Kansas City is the largest city in the US state of Missouri, located in Jackson County. In 1821, the French-American fur trader Francois Chouteau founded a trading outpost in the lower Missouri River valley, and, in 1831, a group of Mormons from New York settled in the area before being forced out by mob violence in 1833. In 1834, John Calvin McCoy founded Westport Landing on a bend in the Missouri, and the landing area was incorporated as the "Town of Kansas" in 1850 and as "Kansas City" in 1854. In 1864, Kansas City was the site of the Battle of Westport amid the American Civil War. After the war, Kansas City grew rapidly, as Octave Chanute built the Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri in 1869, transforming Kansas City into a railroad hub with a booming population and nationally-important stockyards. Kansas City annexed Westport in 1897, and Kansas City also became home to one of the country's largest streetcar systems from 1903 to 1957. During the 1920s, Tom Pendergast's Democratic political machine came to power in the city, dominating its politics until 1939. After World War II, Kansas City experienced suburbanization as affluent residents moved to Johnson County, Kansas and north of the Missouri River. By 1950, Kansas City's Black community made up 12.2% of the population, and Troost Avenue became a persisting racial and economic dividing line, with the Black areas east of Troost suffering from some of the worst murder rates in the country. The riots which followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968 led to further white flight and urban decay, and the white population fell from 89.5% in 1930 to 54.9% in 2010. However, Downtown Kansas City underwent major redevelopment during the 21st century, and its population quadrupled within a decade. By 2020, Kansas City had 508,090 residents, of whom 55.5% were white, 26.5% were Black, 10.7% were Hispanic, 6.3% were multiracial, 2.7% were Asian, and .4% were Native American.
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